Bill C-18

Online News Act

An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada

This enactment regulates digital news intermediaries to enhance fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contribute to its sustainability. It establishes a framework through which digital news intermediary operators and news businesses may enter into agreements respecting news content that is made available by digital news intermediaries. The framework takes into account principles of freedom of expression and journalistic independence.
The enactment, among other things,
(a) applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if, having regard to specific factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses;
(b) authorizes the Governor in Council to make regulations respecting those factors;
(c) specifies that the enactment does not apply in respect of “broadcasting” by digital news intermediaries that are “broadcasting undertakings” as those terms are defined in the Broadcasting Act or in respect of telecommunications service providers as defined in the Telecommunications Act ;
(d) requires the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (the “Commission”) to maintain a list of digital news intermediaries in respect of which the enactment applies;
(e) requires the Commission to exempt a digital news intermediary from the application of the enactment if its operator has entered into agreements with news businesses and the Commission is of the opinion that the agreements satisfy certain criteria;
(f) authorizes the Governor in Council to make regulations respecting how the Commission is to interpret those criteria and setting out additional conditions with respect to the eligibility of a digital news intermediary for an exemption;
(g) establishes a bargaining process in respect of matters related to the making available of certain news content by digital news intermediaries;
(h) establishes eligibility criteria and a designation process for news businesses that wish to participate in the bargaining process;
(i) requires the Commission to establish a code of conduct respecting bargaining in relation to news content;
(j) prohibits digital news intermediary operators from acting, in the course of making available certain news content, in ways that discriminate unjustly, that give undue or unreasonable preference or that subject certain news businesses to an undue or unreasonable disadvantage;
(k) allows certain news businesses to make complaints to the Commission in relation to that prohibition;
(l) authorizes the Commission to require the provision of information for the purpose of exercising its powers and performing its duties and functions under the enactment;
(m) requires the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to provide the Commission with an annual report if the Corporation is a party to an agreement with an operator;
(n) establishes a framework respecting the provision of information to the responsible Minister, the Chief Statistician of Canada and the Commissioner of Competition, while permitting an individual or entity to designate certain information that they submit to the Commission as confidential;
(o) authorizes the Commission to impose, for contraventions of the enactment, administrative monetary penalties on certain individuals and entities and conditions on the participation of news businesses in the bargaining process;
(p) establishes a mechanism for the recovery, from digital news intermediary operators, of certain costs related to the administration of the enactment; and
(q) requires the Commission to have an independent auditor prepare a report annually in respect of the impact of the enactment on the Canadian digital news marketplace.
Finally, the enactment makes related amendments to other Acts.

[Matthew Hatfield]

I welcome this committee doing a study because I think it's an open question whether we need some dedicated government support. I think there's a strong case that some types of journalism we need are not commercially viable, but I don't think the CBC should be cannibalizing the funding we need for a diversity of sources.

I think one logical conclusion of that study is going to be that we need to address areas that don't just have struggling news organizations but may have no news organizations now. We need to ensure that any dedicated support is reaching those kinds of areas. Under Bill C-18, we get precisely the opposite. The funding is going primarily to news organizations that, to some degree, are already succeeding and still exist.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you.

Mr. Hatfield, in one of the articles you wrote, you said that Bill C-18 “puts media under the thumb of government and platforms, encourages the spread of poor quality journalism, and does nothing to rejuvenate local media.” Do you care to expand on that statement?

[Philip Palmer, President, Internet Society Canada Chapter]

Thank you, Madam Chair and honourable members, for this opportunity to address you this morning.

The Internet Society Canada Chapter is an independent not-for-profit corporation that advocates for an open, accessible, safe and affordable Internet. We accept that some regulation of the Internet and its participants is necessary, and it is welcome. We have heard nothing this morning that we disagree with from the various panellists who have spoken.

However, extreme care has to be taken in formulating regulatory policies in order to obtain the best results for Canadians. The Internet is the most revolutionary societal disrupter since the invention of printing, and those disruptions are occurring at warp speed. Its reach is global, as are its impacts.

The Internet features both beacons of light and cesspools of depravity. Its more positive aspects further the goals of an enlightened humanity. Its worst aspects are a challenge to liberal democratic values and to all societal and legal norms.

Social media is often marred by shockingly bad behaviour. It can transmit misinformation and disinformation, discourage reasoned debate and constrain the participation of members of civil society as a result of racism, misogyny, threats and intimidation.

Where is Canada as the world confronts the many challenges that arise from the Internet?

Canada is a small country, economically open to the world and dependent on its relations with its peer countries. The Internet and Internet-based services are the key to Canada's continued integration into the global economy. For Canada to thrive and for her citizens to prosper, it is critical that Canada approach the Internet and its regulation with some humility.

Canada is too small in population and in wealth to establish the norms by which the Internet will be regulated or how Internet service providers will govern themselves. If Canada overreaches and imposes unrealistic economic and social costs on Internet services, it may find its businesses and its citizens cut off from the services and knowledge that are available to its peers.

Canada has already proposed or adopted counterproductive Internet-related measures, two of which were studied by this committee. The Online Streaming Act, rather than bringing Canada's Broadcasting Act in line with the world of Internet-based services, attempts to bring the Internet into the walled garden of the Canadian broadcasting regulatory system. The Online News Act attempts to extort payments from Internet platforms to subsidize news producers.

This committee's present study was inspired by its work on Bill C-18 and Google and Facebook's reactions to it. We maintain that Bill C-18 is deeply flawed. It has already had foreseeably negative impacts on Canadian news businesses and on Canadian consumers of news.

The choice of whether to provide Canadians with access to news and be subject to the act or to withdraw from the Canadian news ecosystem comes down to a business decision. Meta announced early that it would withdraw from the Canadian news market if Bill C-18 was adopted. This was not intimidation; it was a lawful and rational business decision.

The withdrawal of Meta from the Canadian news space has proven to be a hardship for Canadian news producers. If Meta's withdrawal is a hardship, Google's withdrawal from the Canadian news ecosystem would be catastrophic for Canadian news businesses and for the Canadian public.

We welcome the agreement reached between Google and Canadian Heritage. It promises to avoid that catastrophe. Nothing we say here today should be construed as approving the activities of tech giants, a term that encompasses not only the large international behemoths but also our domestic giants—Bell, Rogers and Telus—which dominate domestic markets and extract casino profits from Canadian consumers. It is good to see that Canada is focused on competition law reform.

There are a number of experiments under way in democratic societies that deal with Internet and tech regulation that Canada can learn from, emulate or co-operate with. It is critical that thoughtful policies be crafted that recognize the unique characteristics of the Internet and that they put up the full value of Internet-based services for Canadians. Poor regulatory policies will harm Canada and Canadians.

Thank you very much.

[Jeff Elgie, Chief Executive Officer, Village Media Inc.]

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for having me today.

I apologize if my comments are not directly aligned with the title of this session, but I was asked specifically to come today to provide our perspective on Bill C-18 and the Online News Act.

As a brief introduction, I am the CEO of Village Media, which is headquartered in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. We began with one local news publication and two journalists 10 years ago. Today we own and operate 25 news publications in Ontario and employ approximately 150 Canadians, 90 of whom are journalists.

Beyond operating local sites, Village has developed made-in-Canada technology for the publishing sector. This technology now runs our own publications along with those of Glacier Media, Dougall Media, Great West newspapers, Black Press Media and others. As of now, we power almost 150 news websites across Canada.

As you may know, I spoke in front of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications with respect to Bill C-18 back in May. My position since has not materially changed.

To briefly summarize, we believe the bill and the Online News Act were flawed from the get-go. It was suggested that platforms such as Google and Meta steal our content and provide no meaningful value in exchange. We argued this couldn't be further from the truth. The truth is that we, including news publishers, willingly play to allow for snippets of our content to appear on the platforms, because we benefit tremendously from the traffic we get from them. For Village Media, this helped us grow and launch 25 publications and develop a profitable and sustainable model for local news.

I'm here today to speak about some of the impacts of the Online News Act. It is my belief that we have now created a number of scenarios where, in many cases, news publishers may come out behind. For large publishers, particularly those that had deals with Google and Meta, including Village Media, I expect some of us will be ahead and some of us will be behind financially. While these deals are covered under non-disclosure agreements, it seems apparent that, by having a smaller pool of expected funds from Google—$100 million—and by adding zero funds available from Meta, it is quite possible the ultimate value of the Google deal may in fact be less than the prior deals with both platforms.

For small publishers—including start-up and independent publishers—that did not have deals with either platform, there is still much to be determined as we wait for the final regulations to be released. First, will they qualify? Second, how much will they receive, if so? If you ask many of those small publishers if they would prefer to receive some amount per journalist, which may theoretically equate to approximately $10,000 per year, or have their Meta traffic back, I expect many would prefer to have their Meta traffic back.

This is the scenario for Village Media. Even the best-case scenario for the Google deal likely does not make up for the value of lost Meta traffic. That traffic allowed us to monetize our publications more effectively and to develop new audiences, subscribers and followers we would otherwise be challenged to reach. Facebook in particular was one of the best on-ramps to new publications we have found, and we have tested many. In the absence of Meta, sustainably launching news sites, or even sustaining recently launched sites, might no longer be possible.

This problem goes beyond my own self-interest. As an even worse outcome, Canadians are now no longer exposed to news on Facebook and Instagram. At a time when voter turnout is at record lows and we can expect to be flooded with disinformation through technologies such as generative AI, the missing voices of Canadian journalists in these environments will no doubt be damaging to our society.

Over our 10 years of operation, Village has gone into each year with an expectation of growth and continued sustainability. We're profitable and we reinvest our profits by expanding into new communities and growing our newsrooms. However, as of April of this year, in anticipation of the outcome of the Online News Act, and for the first time ever, our company has paused almost all new hirings and suspended new community launch plans. The potential outcome of the Online News Act has substantially impacted our progress.

Thank you for having me.

[Matthew Hatfield]

Over 12,000 members of our community asked you for fixes to Bill C-18, and over 20,000 of us raised concerns around the government's first online harms proposal, but that's far from the extent of our community's interest in tech platforms. Over 9,000 OpenMedia community members have demanded more anti-harassment tools and control of our data on online platforms. Nearly 34,000 of us have signed actions demanding data protections and regulating the data broker industry.

I look forward to discussing any of these important platform issues with you. Thanks.

[Matthew Hatfield]

Certainly. My apologies.

To me, this hearing's topic seems to be pinning down what's wrong with tech platforms and what our government can do about it. I'll try to answer that question very precisely for you.

What's wrong with tech platforms and their influence on society? It's three things: their size, their vast asymmetrical data compared to regulators and citizens, and the engagement algorithms that drive their business model.

Let's talk size. Platforms like Amazon and Google have a stranglehold on a huge share of Internet commerce, app purchases, advertising and more. They often use that power to set unfair terms vis-à-vis smaller businesses and consumers. I'll note, though, that Bill C-18 misunderstood the specific dynamic around news. It assumes that news has inherent value to platforms that, for Meta at least, it does not.

The good news about the size problem is that Canada is opening new possibilities to do something about it through competition reform in Bill C-56 and Bill C-59. In the U.S., several bills were proposed last year aimed at regulating how tech giants treat small businesses and consumers. They include the American innovation and choice online act and the open app markets act, both of which OpenMedia campaigned for. In Canada, the Competition Bureau has never had the legal basis to study platform power effectively, let alone change it. Soon they will.

My second point is about data asymmetry and privacy. Platforms like Meta and YouTube have an endless volume of sensitive data about each and every one of us. They use it for advertising and to feed recommendations, but not for much else. Partly that's to respect our privacy, which is a very good thing. Their data in the hands of a spy agency or law enforcement would be a dystopic surveillance nightmare and one that we must guard against. However, that lack of curiosity on the platforms' part is also self-serving. It makes it easy to bury accurate study of what may be going wrong for some of their users and, in the worst case, lead that minority to harm themselves or others. The limited research that exists on how platform models may sometimes amplify harms is done with very incomplete data or with crumbs of researcher data access, which platforms are quick to withdraw if their interests are threatened.

Here we need both an individual and structural remedy. The strongest possible privacy bill, Bill C-27, giving Canadians meaningful and unalienable control of our personal data, is one solution, but another must be a very strong provision for both regulator and approved academic researcher access to perform studies on platform data in our upcoming online harms bill. We can't intelligently regulate platforms if we don't understand how any harms they help produce actually occur.

Last but not least, let's talk about the algorithm. Without even noticing it, we've become a society in which most information we get is delivered because it keeps us scrolling and clicking, not because it is nuanced, well researched or true. For music or hobbies, that can be a wonderful tool of self-exploration. People are not passive consumers of our feed. We curate it heavily, pruning the algorithm to serve us what we like most. However, for facts and reporting, that same process is making us a less-informed, angrier and more polarized society. We all feel the impact and very few of us like it. That doesn't make solutions easy, although I would say that Bill C-292, Peter Julian's bill, is something worth considering here.

I'll give a couple of signposts for what might help. We welcome this committee's interest in a dedicated study of how to create a viable news sector in Canada that continues producing vetted information. There's a case that Canadian news needs permanent government support, but the more involved government becomes, the more urgent it is that funds move through a system that is fully transparent to the public, has clear and fair criteria for who gets what support and prioritizes funds where they're most needed, in local news deserts and public accountability journalism, not shovelling funds indifferently toward Bell or the CBC. The alternative of stacking complex funding band-aids one on top of the other until they represent the majority of news funding is not going to build public trust in truthful journalism.

We would also welcome a Canadian study of how social media algorithms are impacting society. However, regulating the algorithm, if it comes, must be aimed at expanding transparency and personal control over how it works for Canadian Internet users, not manipulating it for what the government thinks is best for us.

[Matthew Hatfield, Executive Director, OpenMedia]

Good morning. I'm Matt Hatfield. I'm the executive director of OpenMedia, a grassroots community of nearly 280,000 people in Canada who work together for an open, accessible and surveillance-free Internet.

I am speaking to you today from the unceded territory of the Tsawout First Nation.

This hearing came from Bill C-18's hearing. I'm happy to answer questions about how that bill has landed and what must come next, but in listening to the exchanges you've had with witnesses before today, it seems to me that—

[Dr. Joan Donovan, Online Disinformation and Misinformation Expert, Boston University College of Communication, As an Individual]

Thank you so much for being here and thank you for the invitation to testify at this hearing.

I'm Dr. Joan Donovan, and I've spent my career studying harmful online campaigns, including misinformation, disinformation and media manipulation. I'm an assistant professor at Boston University's College of Communication.

Until recently, I worked for the Harvard Kennedy School of Government as the research director of the Shorenstein Center and the director of the technology and social change research project, also known as TaSC. TaSC focused on online media manipulation campaigns and influence operations by bad actors, including adversarial nations running misinformation and disinformation campaigns, skewing public discourse, seeding hate, violence and incitement online, and, of course, undercutting democracy's free and fair elections.

Before Harvard, I led my research at Data & Society, a non-profit where my team and I mapped how social institutions were intentionally disrupted through online campaigns. I chose to join Harvard after a lengthy recruitment period because they convinced me that they would support this work at scale.

As we know, governments around the world and the public have come to rely on my work, as well as that of many other researchers in this field, but from my work, they have learned who is behind COVID misinformation, especially the calls for hydroxychloroquine. We also learned what domestic and foreign operatives are doing to create division in communities, explaining the behaviour of 81 countries that deploy cyber-troops to manipulate public opinion online. I have worked with the WHO and the CDC on strategies to mitigate medical misinformation, and most recently, I've worked with the Canadian election misinformation project at McGill University.

In my whistle-blower disclosure submitted on my own behalf by Whistleblower Aid, my team's groundbreaking research in this field was ground to a halt in obeisance to Facebook by the dean of Harvard Kennedy School, a man now known for his deference to donor interests.

In short, in October 2021, a well-known Facebook fixer became enraged in a donor meeting when I told the group that I had Frances Haugen's entire cache of internal Facebook documents and that I planned to create a public collaborative archive of that. I said they were the most important documents in Internet history. This donor and Facebook PR executive attacked everything I said at that meeting. He and Facebook-affiliated donors have powerful influence at Harvard, so that was the start of the Kennedy School's campaign to stop my work and create unceasing misery for my research team. When Harvard received a donation of half a billion dollars from The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the fate of my research was sealed. HKS killed the TaSC project and fired me after silencing me and my team for two years.

Courtney Radsch testified here that tech giant intimidation includes researchers and academics and a further weaponization of the big tobacco and big oil playbooks, silencing and skewing research and protecting their profits and lies to the public. However, unlike the censorship campaigns of those before them, tech giants have more tools at their disposal because they control the information landscape and the data about it. For instance, Meta's actions in Canada to fight Bill C-18 have deprived Canadians of more than five million news interactions a day, according to McGill's media ecosystem observatory.

You see the damage of their for-profit motivation acutely in Canada. As Imran Ahmed from the Center for Countering Digital Hate testified to here, we know that bad actors fill the vacuum when credible news and information leave us, with little else to look at. When a school like Harvard is complicit in the corporate direction of research, what can protect those of us who work to document, analyze and share the truth? As others have noted, Facebook's actions to avoid accountability have targeted legislators and regulators in the U.S. and Canada.

I want to close by saying this. I support the online algorithm transparency act, known as Bill C-292 here in Canada, and the similar legislation introduced in New Zealand, the U.K. and the European Union. I was raised with the deepest conviction that I'm responsible for the consequences of my actions, and tech giants must be too. As an academic, I have a moral obligation to tell the truth—then and now.

Thank you very much.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

That bill is clearly still before the industry committee, I would assume. With cybersecurity, perhaps it could be with public safety.

I know that we had some serious concerns with that piece of legislation. I think we want to ensure that the rights of Canadians are always protected. When we're considering Bill C-26, which deals with cybersecurity, we know that this is an evolving field and there's an evolving threat level that comes with that. We know that the government, quite frankly, has failed to protect the rights of Canadians when it comes to their security—both personal security and in our communities. When it comes to the online environment, they've been lax. They've turned a blind eye, quite frankly, to threats to cybersecurity. I think we've seen that again and again.

We saw it when this government refused to ban Huawei from the 5G network for years in spite of overwhelming evidence that the communist regime in Beijing was using that technology in the Huawei network as a way to gain access to personal information. That was a security vulnerability.

We saw that our Five Eyes partners in the security establishment—our international partnerships with Australia, New Zealand and the United States—all took action to protect their citizens and their networks from cybersecurity threats. That's something this government did not do. It took them years and they fought it and fought it before they took the decision—much too late—to exclude Huawei from our cybersecurity networks. That resulted, quite frankly, in embarrassing situations where Canada was excluded from high-level meetings of the Five Eyes.

We saw it very recently, when Australia had its deal with the United States to purchase submarines, for instance. There was an exclusion of Canada because Canada's networks were not deemed to be secure enough to allow us to participate in those very important, high-level meetings. These are examples where the government has failed to take cybersecurity seriously.

As I said, we have grave concerns with Bill C-26. It's troubling to see that this bill would cede power to another piece of legislation or have this coordinating amendment, so there would be two pieces of legislation that we believe are flawed coordinating with one another. I think this is the sort of thing where we should be considering what is in Bill C-26 as we discuss this. We can't simply agree holus-bolus to something in another act if we haven't considered that fully, here at this committee.

I think that this particular clause is one where, perhaps as the evening goes on, we will find a way to bring about an amendment or to look at ways we can make sure that the concerns we had with Bill C-26 are addressed.

The summary of Bill C-26 states:

Part 1 amends the Telecommunications Act to add the promotion of the security of the Canadian telecommunications system as an objective of the Canadian telecommunications policy and to authorize the Governor in Council and the Minister of Industry to direct telecommunications service providers to do anything, or refrain from doing anything, that is necessary to secure the Canadian telecommunications system. It also establishes an administrative monetary penalty scheme to promote compliance with orders and regulations made by the Governor in Council and the Minister of Industry to secure the Canadian telecommunications system as well as rules for judicial review of those orders and regulations.

It continues:

Part 2 enacts the Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act to provide a framework for the protection of the critical cyber systems of services and systems that are vital to national security or public safety and that are delivered or operated as part of a work, undertaking or business that is within the legislative authority of Parliament. It also, among other things,

(a) authorizes the Governor in Council to designate any service or system as a vital service or vital system;

(b) authorizes the Governor in Council to establish classes of operators in respect of a vital service or vital system;

(c) requires designated operators to, among other things, establish and implement cyber security programs, mitigate supply-chain and third-party risks, report cyber security incidents and comply with cyber security directions;

(d) provides for the exchange of information between relevant parties; and

(e) authorizes the enforcement of the obligations under the Act and imposes consequences for non-compliance.

Cybersecurity, as I've said, is a growing concern for Canadians. It remains a national security concern. It remains an economic security concern. We know we lose when things like patents, trademarked information and secrets are lost because of a failure to ensure we have adequate cybersecurity in place. We know the government doesn't have a legal mechanism to compel industry action to address cyber-threats or vulnerabilities in the telecommunications sector.

Bill C-26 is another example of the Minister of Industry being given sweeping powers, as we heard with Bill C-33, where the minister is given sweeping powers to enact orders that, in his opinion, are necessary to protect port infrastructure, port operations, etc. We just dealt with that in a previous clause. I think this is another example where we need to ensure that the powers given in Bill C-26 are proportional—that there are checks and balances, and that the rights of Canadians are always protected when the minister is exercising the rights and powers given to him or her in the legislation. It's another example of giving the minister broad powers to enact the legislation.

Now, cybersecurity is something that Conservatives have been raising the alarm about for a long time. We did it when we first created, under a conservative motion, the Canada–China special committee. That was an issue that was raised there. In the context of Huawei, it is something we raised time and time again: our concerns that our 5G network was not being protected.

There are opportunities to strengthen our cybersecurity protocols. We need to ensure that not only are the privacy rights of Canadians respected, but that there's also no attempt at censorship for Canadian citizens when they are operating in the cyber-environment. We've seen the government go down that road as well, with Bill C-18 and with Bill C-10. They want to control what Canadians see, and control the algorithms of what will show up in their social media, for instance.

We have a hard time trusting the government when it comes to anything to do with cybersecurity or Internet regulations. They've proven time and time again that they're willing to sacrifice the rights of Canadians in order to promote their own narrow agenda.

Bill C-26, unfortunately, increases regulation and red tape, often, we believe, without adequate oversight and without votes in Parliament.

We've seen, even here today, that the rights of members or parliamentarians, the supremacy of Parliament, are things that this government does not put as the highest priority. If Parliament gets in the way, they simply try to bypass it.

I think Bill C-26 is another example of where that has happened. We have grave concerns with that, as I outlined briefly. There is also—

[Rachel Curran]

Monsieur Villemure, we would love to not be in this position. We would love to have news on our platforms. The problem is that the government, through Bill C-18, the Online News Act, has asked us to pay an uncapped amount, an unknown amount, for content that has no commercial value to us.

We believe we provide a great deal of value to news publishers in the form of free distribution and marketing. That amount we've calculated at $230 million per year. We would love to get back to putting news on our platforms and providing publishers with those free tools. We're not able to do that under the framework of the Online News Act.

Mr. Villemure, if you could work with your government colleagues to make amendments to that legislation that would allow us to put news back on our platforms, we would love to do that.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you.

Right now, under Bill C-18.... I'm sorry; I should not say that.

Google has managed to get an exemption from Bill C-18 and has offered $100 million to the news sector in exchange for that exemption. It is proposed by the PBO, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, that about a third of that funding is going to go to the CBC, which is already a publicly funded broadcaster to the tune of $1.4 billion and has another $400 million in ad revenue and subscriptions.

What does this do to the overall news media market and its future in this country, when big tech and big government collude to give one-third of this money to a public broadcaster?

[Sean Speer]

One of the challenges, MP Thomas, that news start-ups face in terms of building an audience and building awareness in the marketplace is, of course, finding different channels to reach that audience.

Up until now, for The Hub—and I think others have testified similarly—Meta and Google have been a major part of that process. We don't see the platforms as a threat or playing a counterproductive role. They've enabled us to build and grow what are increasingly sustainable news organizations that can start to fill some of the gaps that have been created by the process of disruption, which is at the heart of much of the work the committee is doing.

One of the consequences, of course, of Bill C-18 has been that many of us have lost the ability to communicate, reach our current audience and grow it, because the law has caused Meta to leave the Canadian market. Fortunately, the agreement between Google and the government prevented a scenario whereby Google similarly left the market. Had that happened, I fear that a lot of the progress we're seeing in the new and independent media sector would have been fundamentally disrupted.

I would say that, as you think about the work the committee is doing, I would encourage you to start with the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. Permit entrepreneurs, innovators and, of course, long-standing media organizations to go through the iterative process of trial and error to figure out how we can continue to deliver the news and information that Canadians need, reflecting the changing technological environment.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you. My first question is for Mr. Speer.

You said that right now in the news sector we're seeing lots of new and innovative approaches being taken and that they're largely being driven by market values. You said that this is a good thing and that government intervention is thwarting or distorting that innovation that's taking place.

I'm curious if you can expand on that a bit in terms of the impact that government interventions such as Bill C-18 have on the innovative news sector and its future.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

No. I was just going to say that it's interesting when we talk about governments at the national and provincial levels. They're the ones that have caused a lot of the crises in local newspapers. They pulled every ad they could in rural Canada. The crisis has hit, and some of the MPs around this table have really realized that, “Oh, the federal government is putting so much money into Meta and Google, and so on, and less into local newspapers.” We've been saying that, Madam Chair, around this table, particularly Conservative MPs, dealing with Bill C-18. Local newspapers are the ones that are disappearing faster than any other. Finally, everyone else has realized it.

That's all I have to say.

CBC/Radio-Canada

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Prime Minister]

Mr. Speaker, as a government, we have always supported CBC/Radio-Canada and the services it provides to local communities across the country.

One of the first measures we took as government was to cancel the Harper government's cuts to our public broadcaster. Supporting local news and journalists during these difficult times for the industry is exactly why we introduced Bill C‑18.

While the Leader of the Opposition celebrates Canadian families being laid off, we will continue to support local journalists and local news in Canada. We are very open to working with the Bloc Québécois on this, as always.